


prom 1991

by awkwardspaceturtle



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Coming Out, Dancing, F/M, Fluffy Ending, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, High School, Jealousy, M/M, Minor Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Pining, Prom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-02-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:22:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22894813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awkwardspaceturtle/pseuds/awkwardspaceturtle
Summary: They say prom is a magical night -- and maybe it is, because somehow, Eddie gets asked by a girl for a dance. The thing is, for some reason he finds that he just can't move to the music at all.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 4
Kudos: 110





	prom 1991

**Author's Note:**

> This has been slowly building in my mind since I saw the 2019 movie, and I just wanted to finish this story without doing math. I honestly didn’t really have the energy to validate prom years in the USA, so. *sweats* Please don’t worry yourself about the math any more than I did. Hence 1991.

“Okay everyone get ready!” Richie cries out with needless intensity as Madonna heralds the tracklist of the night. He is the first to jump out of his chair to drag the rest of the Loser’s Club into somewhere near the middle of the designated dancing area.

“It’s time to win some hearts tonight and make them regret not coming to the dance with us!”

“With those dance moves?” Eddie barks back over the growing din as he breaks out his greatest hits. “More like you’re validating their decision.”

“Tell me that after you’re done embarrassing yourself,” Richie retorts, and thus begins the most embarrassing sequence of eurhythmics that none of them really cared enough to be ashamed about.

After little to no effort at all to look for dates, they unanimously came together as a group, and they’ve been having such a great time since they met up on their bikes. Unlike most everyone who were trying to impress their dates, or waiting for another to offer them a dance, the Loser’s Club decided to simply make the most out of the night they were required to dress up for.

All huddled in their own little circle, everyone is fully immersed in their own thing: Stan and Bill are singing more than they are dancing, Mike is tossing his head while he plays an imaginary electric guitar with Ben on the drums, and Bev, Eddie and Richie are arms deep in an intense dance battle with each other.

_Taaaaake on me~_

_Take! On me!_ Everyone on the dance floor echoes in a small sea of flailing arms and bobbing heads. Gradually, everyone else is leaving their tables and coming out from the dimly lit corners of the gymnasium and into the bright kaleidoscope of colors. Starship comes on, and they’re all either dancing or singing, or both.

Just as the music shifts from one energetic beat to another, someone seems to be trying to dance her way into their group. More particularly, she’s trying to match her moves with Eddie who has let go of all his inhibitions. In one grand dance maneuver, he finally notices her - - just as he hits her face with his elbow.

“Oh god! Crap, I’m so sorry!” Eddie immediately turns to see her clutch her cheek in pain. Behind him, his friends are visibly stupefied: Stan looks a little scared; Ben and Mike look genuinely worried; Bill has a hand over his mouth; Beverly looks sideways at Richie before looking back awkwardly at the girl. And Richie, his mouth is open all the way in amused shock and mischief.

Eddie, who is known for talking fast without tripping over his words, trips on multiple words. “Ah shit, oh man I-I’m really sorry, are you okay? I mean, obviously, no, you’re not. I mean, honestly, I -- I really didn’t see y…ou…”

“Angela,” she finishes for him. “I sit two rows beside you in Intermediate Mathematics.”

“Y-yeah, of course, I know you.” Eddie shrugs (awkwardly) nonchalantly as memories of a girl in near-perpetual pigtails surface in his mind. She always wore her bangs down -- until this evening, no one has really known her forehead. “I-it’s just. The make-up. And the hair. And the dress. I’m not so good with faces.”

“Or girls,” Richie snickers rather loudly behind him, to which Eddie shoots him a dark look before returning all innocent to Angela.

“Y-you’re cute,” she says with a nervous laugh, much to Eddie’s (and the whole Loser’s Club’s) surprise.

Eddie responds with an equally awkward half-laugh. “This isn’t about my height right? Because statistically, I might even grow taller than these guys.”

“Maybe you can make it up to me?” She asks, or _gawks_ is more like it with how sudden she blurts it out. “I mean, you could at least offer me a dance…?”

Eddie looks at her, wide-eyed. Did he hear that right? He cranes his head to look at his friends. _Did I hear that right?_ Based on how big their eyes are, they seem to be asking the same question. He raises his eyebrows at them, and almost everyone nods profusely. Beverly is noticeably nodding her head a little slowly, her doe eyes voicing something unclear. Richie is simply looking at him.

“Uh, sure,” Eddie says, suddenly feeling a little unease after he takes his eyes away from Richie. Surely he should have a million ways of making fun of Eddie being asked to dance? The lack of it feels wrong to Eddie, somehow.

But then he looks into Angela’s blue eyes and finally sees his own nervousness reflected in there tenfold. Clearly it was taking all her courage to ask him, and right in front of his friends, no less.

“Um. Can I have this dance?” He asks her properly. She visibly brightens up, and he feels his own chest lighten up.

As he leaves the group with Angela’s hand in his, he hears Ben’s voice over the dying music saying “Rich, where are you going?” but doesn’t hear the rest as Berlin’s _Take My Breath Away_ blasts through the speakers with comical timing to signal the start of the slow dance.

“Oh, uh,” Angela says as she shyly places both hands around Eddie’s neck. Her added height boosted by her heels makes Eddie feel all the more awkward and they step on each others’ feet a couple of times, but at the very least, she looks happy.

“You look nice,” Eddie finally says in the near end of the song, after probing his brain for what to say.

“Thanks, you too,” she replies. He really did mean it, though. They don’t say much else to each other even as Kylie Minogue finally hits the chorus of _Especially For You_ and everyone around them belts out _And now we’re back together~ Together~~_ in unison.

Feeling that the awkwardness didn’t dissipate at all despite his attempt at conversation, his eyes scan the dimly lit gymnasium - Stan is getting a cup for his punch, Bill and Mike are chatting with each other, Richie isn’t anywhere that he can see. Ben and Bev are off dancing with each other just a little bit away from the dance floor where boys and girls have paired up like him and Angela. They don’t have their arms around each other, but they are not dancing with anyone else at the moment either. Bev laughs at something Ben says and she slaps his arm good-naturedly, inciting a blush to creep up Ben’s cheeks. They are simply enjoying themselves just chatting and moving to the music.

Eddie goes back to where he and Angela are right now. He can’t imagine laughing together and slapping Angela’s arm all familiar-like and not getting anything lighter than an elbow to the face. He just doesn’t have that history and rapport with her like he has with the rest of the Loser’s Club.

And maybe that’s just it.

The silence and awkwardness between him and Angela has nothing to do with any romantic tension at all -- or magic, as people often refer to the overall feeling of prom -- there really is just absolutely nothing between him and this girl. Sure, they’ve been in the same school for how many years now, but does he know her, really? Does she know him back? There was totally nothing to talk about with this otherwise nice girl, nothing that sparks anything in him to express himself. His eyes dart back to his friends to check if Richie has made it back to them from wherever he’s been -- and to Eddie’s disappointment, he isn’t there.

“Something wrong?” Angela says, her eyebrows furrowed in concern. Her voice sounded like it came all the way from the back of the room instead of in his ear.

“Huh?” Eddie says back. He heard her, but his question stems more from the thought that she’s realizing he’s not having a good time with her. “No, uh, yeah, I mean…”

She looks at him with genuine concern. He absolutely cannot bear to ruin her night any more than this.

“I’m sorry, Angela,” he says. “About your cheek, and. This.”

She looks a little hurt, but she’s also smart enough to know that the prom can’t magic anyone into some sort of romance overnight. She gives him a little nod, as if to say _At least we tried, but that’s okay too I guess_. Eddie feels like even more of a dick because why does she have to be such a nice girl who just happened to notice him.

“For the record, I do appreciate it,” she says after they both release each other. “Not the obvious bruise on my face over the weekend, but. This.”

Eddie laughs. She trips over her own words and she shrugs a lot, but she seems a bit cool that way. And now that they’re not forcing anything, it feels all the more organic just being two classmates swaying to the same song. More importantly, though, he gives her around a dozen pointers on how to nurse the injury and how she might need to do it asap.

“Got it. Guess I’ll see you around, Kaspbrak,” she says with a smile, already turning the other way, which Eddie is actually thankful for because he just wasn’t sure if he should call her Garland or Beacham. There are two Angelas in their year.

“Okay,” he says with a sigh as he realizes he just ended what might be the only dance he’ll have tonight with a girl. As he makes his way back to where his friends are, he also realizes it’s not that important to him at all.

“Have you seen Richie?” He asks when Ben and Beverly see him come over.

“Said he was going out for a smoke,”’ Ben says. “It’s been a bit long, hasn’t it? Though Richie couldn’t have gone that far, he said he’d come back for all the leftovers. But maybe we should go look--”

“Oh, no it’s fine,” Eddie says a little too abruptly. “I mean, I’ll go. It’s about time for the final dance, after all.”

“Uh, yeah,” Ben says. He really does blush so easily. “Let’s call the others--”

“This is fine, too,” Beverly says. “I mean, I’m okay if you are, too.”

 _Oh_. This. This is the kind of magic people talk about. Some people might look back on this and think that’s how prom works -- but a part of Eddie thinks it’s not simply the prom’s doing at all. This is years of shared history and friendship. This is something that develops organically over time, not by magic overnight. He knows not to stick around and be an extra wheel. He leaves them to it just as the DJ calls all couples to dance the last song of the night.

Outside in the chilly parking lot, he spots a familiar figure leaning on the sturdy trunk of a lamppost by the fence. From afar, he already knows who those heavy set of shoulders belong. Even blind, Eddie would know by the scent of the cigarettes alone who it was.

“Back so soon, Eddie Spaghetti?” Richie greets him with not so much as an attempt at eye contact as he comes close. “That lifestyle not suiting you?”

For some indiscernible reason, it annoys Eddie that Richie is being this way. Things felt so much better back when they were dancing like idiots without a care in the world. He can’t believe that was hardly an hour ago.

“Screw you, Rich, I came here thinking I didn’t want you to be alone or whatever.”

“How gracious of you. Why’d you even think I was lonely?” Surprisingly, Richie seems almost offended that Eddie had thought that way. This is getting sour real quick, Eddie thinks. What is with this unpleasant tension all of a sudden?

“Okay?” He shrugs. “Maybe this is really just a momentous moment in our school life, and I just cared enough to not want my friend to feel that way?”

“Yeah, yeah of course. Your friend.” Richie throws his cigarette onto the pavement, and stomped it out with me force than needed. “Me and you, we’re cool. Bros to the end. We’re, as you call it, _friends_.”

As his words left him, Richie almost looks pained. Meters away, but seemingly a country apart, the gymnasium erupts in cheers. Someone’s probably being crowned prom king or queen, or something else Eddie could care less about.

“You’re talking real weird right now, Rich. What the hell is really going on?”

Richie lets out a big breath, and he leans back onto the pole, shoulders sagged. In the shadows cast by the lamp above them, Eddie can’t seem to make out the expression he’s making. Yet for some reason, he suddenly thinks he doesn’t need to know -- he can feel it sharply in the air around them.

“I’m really not making sense right now, aren’t I?” Richie finally says, his voice uncharacteristically sounding like it’s coming out in pieces. “Maybe you’re better off going back to Angela Garland. Dancing with a girl.”

 _Oh, so I was right the first time, it is Garland_. But more importantly, “What’s Angela got to do with any of this? Do you like her? Did you want to dance with her?”

Unbelievably, that’s what sets him off. He’s getting worked up again, talking urgently and a little high-strung. Like a cord pulled in both directions towards its limits.

“What? No.” Richie pushes himself off the pole. “What gave you that idea?”

“Or is the idea of anyone wanting to dance with me so crazy to you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe it’s like that.”

“Uh, okay?” Eddie scoffs. He is used to Richie’s brand of being unbearably difficult, but this is beyond exasperating. Not Richie himself, but the situation they’re in. They’d only just been dancing and making faces at each other. How and when did they lose their rhythm?

Eddie’s voice goes an octave higher. “Then why don’t you go dance? No one is fucking stopping you! Choose whoever you like!”

“It’s not that easy, Eds!” Richie exclaims, pain once again driving more emphasis to his words. Then, as quickly as he rises, he withers; he takes a couple of steps back from Eddie, putting distance back between them. “I… I can’t just choose and expect to be chosen back.”

“Wh-wh…? What do you mean?”

The way Richie’s voice trembles startles Eddie. This doesn’t look like the idiot who dragged them all out to dance tonight. Slumped on the fence, Richie looks like he has never known music.

Something pulls Eddie to take a tentative step toward him. He’s almost afraid that Richie would swipe his arm away, but he reaches out to put an arm on his shoulder. Still, Richie will not meet his eyes.

“Hey, look. Look at me. Really look at me.” Eddie says carefully and softly. Slowly, like one would when nursing a hurt animal, he gently places both hands on Richie’s cheeks to get him to focus. Whatever it is, he doesn’t want Richie to feel isolated in this. “The music’s not gone, okay? If somehow, a nice girl like Angela Garland asked me to dance tonight, surely there’s a girl back in there waiting for you, too--”

“No, Eds, you don’t get it, I--” Richie says in one hurried breath, frustration parching his throat. This isn’t their usual petty banters at all. Eddie can see that Richie, for once, was really… authentically vulnerable. He realizes that Richie is trembling with whatever is there pent up inside him -- he feels it in the hands that are suddenly on his, locking him in place. Silence weighs heavily around them as Eddie waits for Richie to say his piece.

“I…” Richie closes his eyes.

 _Look at me. Really look at me._ Eddie doesn’t pull away. He doesn’t, so that Richie will see him when he opens his eyes again.

When Richie finally finds his voice, it is barely a whisper. “I don’t think I can dance with girls.”

Silence. Nothing but the desperate urgency in Richie’s eyes. This isn’t anything he expected to hear, but he knows this isn’t all that Richie wants him to hear.

“Okay. Okay then. No dancing. We don’t have to dance.”

Richie shakes his head. “No, I mean. I dance. I can dance so fucking hard. Just.” His words are stuck in traffic, his throat flooding with so much he doesn’t know which one to allow passage first. He shuts his eyes tight. Opens them. He’s looking straight into Eddie’s.

“Just not. With girls.

“... _Oh_.”

Richie’s grip on him loosens up. Eddie knows it’s not because he lost his strength; he’s giving Eddie the chance to get away from him now. Despite all those years of constant pestering and jibes worthy of ending a friendship, this is what he’s expecting to be scorned, to be rejected by Eddie for.

Eddie already knows it in himself that he can’t. He can’t even want to. He doesn’t believe their relationship could be that shallow. His hands fall down to Richie’s chest. His heart is beating like crazy. Strange, Eddie thinks his is, too.

He reaches down and takes Richie’s hands in his. “Okay.”

“ _Okay_? That’s it, that’s all you have to say?”

“Mhm.” Eddie starts to feel Richie’s hands tremble again.

“You’re not going to say some medical shit like, I should go get my brain checked? Or that I’m sick and that there’s medicine for someone like me?”

“A pill for being an idiot, maybe? Liking someone isn’t something you can cure yourself of, or even have the need to, for that matter.”

Richie lets out a nervous laugh, but as he scans Eddie’s face and searches his eyes, he finds that there’s absolutely nothing to be uneasy about. Right here, is a safe space to be.

Eddie sees a familiar gleam in Richie’s eyes, albeit faint, and he knows the nervous tension has completely left them. The easy banter means that they’re settling into their own brand of normalcy again. The familiarity of it is uplifting, comforting. It doesn’t even matter that they’re standing so close to each other more than what’s necessary. Or that they’re still holding hands. He doesn’t really mind.

“So, is there a lucky chump you wanted to dance with tonight?”

For the first time that evening, Richie blushes. Furiously. Even more deeply than Ben did, Eddie thinks. His heart rate’s back up, too.

Richie averts his eyes, but doesn’t let go, still.

“Maybe I’ll tell you later.”

It has been years since that night.

Today belongs to a different decade, a different world altogether, and yet the old days have a way of popping up to bring a shot of nostalgia every now and then. Right now it takes the form of A-ha’s _Take On Me_ blasting from the car radio.

Eddie taps his fingers on the wheel as he excitedly hums the intro. “Hm, brings back memories. Prom of ‘91. I totally beat your sorry ass dancing.”

Beside him on the passenger’s seat, Richie rolls his eyes. “You know what else you beat? A poor girl’s face, that’s what.”

“Whoa, that was a fucking accident,” Eddie protests, but the redness blooming on his ears betray the guilt and embarrassment that the years have failed to erode. “And she met her current husband in the clinic she went to get looked at, so.”

“Angela did say her only regret was not being able to stay for the last dance.”

“Well, neither did we. The universe has taken its revenge to balance things out.”

“Did it, though?” Richie smiles. “I mean, you did become my last dance.”

Eddie’s entire face heats up.

“You are fucking embarrassing. Stop flirting with me; you’re married, Mr. Kaspbrak.”

Richie reaches out to pull on Eddie’s hand and kisses it.

“Whatever you say, Mr. Tozier.”


End file.
